Facebook's Place Tips May Lead Advertisers to Pot of GoldFebruary 02, 2015
Facebook last week announced Place Tips for iPhones, a feature that will give subscribers location-based recommendations at the top of their News Feeds. No mention was made of launching Place Tips for Android or Windows Phone devices. Tapping on Place Tips will call up the information, which will include posts and photos friends have shared about a particular place.

Google Sets Its Sights on the Under-12 SetDecember 08, 2014
Google soon will begin targeting kids 12 and under with tailored versions of its products, likely including its search functionality, along with offerings such as YouTube and Chrome. The company is pushing to change make its products fun and safe for children, Pavni Diwanji, Google vice president of engineering, said last week.
The new initiative reportedly will begin next year.

Hear, Hear: The Rise of Social ListeningNovember 24, 2014
Evian ran a promotion to give away bottled water during August in New York. People had only to tweet using the hashtag #evianBottleService to get free water delivered to them on the streets. To pull it off, Evian coordinated its social listening efforts and its marketing strategy -- a valuable combination for brands that want to make use of what they hear online.

Twitter Opens Entire Multibillion-Tweet Gold Mine to SearchersNovember 20, 2014
Twitter this week began indexing every public tweet posted since it began operating in 2006. "Our long-standing goal has been to let people search through every tweet ever published," said Yi Zhuang, who led the project team. Use cases Zhuang cited for the new infrastructure include results for entire TV and sports seasons, conferences, industry discussions and long-lived hashtag conversations.

Picture This: Instagram for CRMNovember 18, 2014
With millions of active monthly users, Instagram is a prolific, lively social media community. Businesses want to get in on the Instagram game in order to boost marketing and enhance customer relations. It might not be immediately obvious to some businesses, however, just how they can get involved with Instagram and make it work for them. One way is to invite customers behind the scenes.

Kana Burnishes Omnichannel Customer Engagement ToolsNovember 11, 2014
Kana has announced the first major upgrade of its flagship enterprise product following its acquisition earlier this year by Verint. Kana Enterprise Customer Engagement Optimization platform has been available since Oct. 31. At its core, the platform is the same, said Director of Product Marketing Kana Kelly Koelliker. It provides tools to facilitate customer engagement across multiple channels.

Monster Tiptoes Onto TwitterNovember 05, 2014
Monster Worldwide last week announced that it was rolling out a beta of a social recruitment ad platform, starting this Thursday. Monster Social Ads uses Twitter's Ads API to serve tailored job listings to Twitter users, based on career attributes such as occupation or industry type. A number of U.S. companies have signed on for the beta, including eBay, T-Mobile and UPS.

Mea Culpa: Social Media Apology Do's and Don'tsOctober 21, 2014
When DiGiorno tweeted, "You had pizza. #WhyIStayed," Twitter lit up with criticism of the brand. The hashtag "WhyIStayed" is associated with domestic violence. In response to the firestorm its tweet unleashed, DiGiorno peppered its Twitter feed with apology after apology, all of them essentially like this: "A million apologies. Did not read what the hashtag was about before posting."

Don't Look Now, but Ads Are Coming to SnapchatOctober 09, 2014
Ads soon will arrive on Snapchat. However, they will not target individual users. Rather, they'll appear in a more generalized fashion within the service's Snapchat Stories feature among shared photos and videos, CEO Evan Spiegel said Wednesday.
A new service for disappearing content and ads, called "Snapchat Discovery," reportedly also is in the works for launch this year.

Twitter Cautiously Experiments With Buy ButtonSeptember 09, 2014
Twitter on Monday began testing a new Buy button with a small percentage of its users in the U.S. -- one of the first steps in a larger initiative to build purchase functionality into the service. A small group of brands, including Burberry, Home Depot, Keith Urban, the Nature Conservatory and Soundgarden, are participating by sending offers that are unique for Twitter users.

YouTube Does Social Media Marketing BestSeptember 08, 2014
It is a given that a marketing campaign must include a social media element -- especially when a brand is rolling out a new product. What is less certain is on which channel the brand should focus its time and resources. An answer was provided last week by Aol Platforms, which released the results of a study that tracked social purchase interactions through Convertro.

Twitter Lets Ordinary Users Get AnalyticalAugust 29, 2014
Twitter this week announced that its analytics tool now can be used by everyone. Twitter's analytics tool lets users click on any tweet to see how people engage with it in real time. They can compare their tweet activity month over month and see how they trend over time. Users also can click on a tweet to see the number of retweets, replies, favorites, follows or clicks received.

Facebook Trains Sights on ClickbaitersAugust 26, 2014
Clickbaiting may soon come to an end on Facebook, which has launched an effort to deal with the problem. Posts with clickbait headlines get higher placement in News Feeds, pushing down more desirable content. Eighty percent of the time, users prefer headlines that help them decide whether they want to read a full article before having to click through, a Facebook survey indicated.

Twitter Tromps on SpammersAugust 25, 2014
Twitter has reported success with its BotMaker spam-prevention system. Because Twitter operates in real time, BotMaker is designed to work fast to eliminate spammers. Its main goals are to bar spam accounts from being created, to reduce the time they spend on Twitter if they do show up, and to reduce Twitter's reaction time in responding to spammer workarounds that bypass its protection systems.

Facebook Rolls in Mobile Ad DoughJuly 24, 2014
Facebook chalked up $2.68 billion in ad revenue in Q2, up 67 percent year over year, and mobile ads accounted for about 62 percent of that haul, totaling $1.66 billion. "The ability of Facebook to move into the mobile ad space and to monetize it successfully was heavily questioned last year," said Andreas Scherer, managing partner at Salto Partners.

Facebook Saves the Day From Slipping AwayJuly 24, 2014
Facebook has launched a feature that allows users to save content from their News Feed to read or watch later. Called "Save," it is designed help users who may be inundated by links to articles, music clips and videos to separate the wheat from the chaff. Users who see something intriguing now can choose the Save option in a dropdown menu in the upper right-hand corner of a post.

Investors Wise to Secret's Tantalizing PromiseJuly 22, 2014
Secret last week announced that a recent round of funding, to the tune of $25 million, would help it expand its social networking reach. Since its launch about six months ago, Secret has provided a platform for users to post anonymous notes on topics ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Though its draw is anonymity, Secret points users to posts by people in their circle of friends.

Attentive.ly's Social Marketing Taps Customer InterestsJuly 21, 2014
Attentive.ly recently released its application on the Eloqua platform, digging a deeper foothold for itself in the CRM enterprise space. Attentive.ly provides social marketing automation functionality in the form of a plug-and-play toolset that works with a CRM overlay.
Using its tools, companies can organize customers in specific groups, listen to their online conversations, and send personalized marketing messages.

'Buy' Button Could Turn Facebook Into Impulse-Shopping-VilleJuly 18, 2014
Facebook is testing a function that would allow users to buy products without leaving the site or app. Small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S. that are taking part in the trial can add the Buy button to ads displayed in users' News Feeds or in posts on their pages. Users will see the Buy button in relevant ads whether they're on the Facebook website or using their mobile device.

Poor Mistake Management: 3 Model LessonsMay 29, 2014
I am a nerd with a goofy hobby -- I build plastic model airplanes. However, that hobby affords me a view of customer relationship issues in an interesting and intimate way. Most of the time, the vendors in this space get things right, realizing theirs is a niche industry and their customers really are in charge, especially since all spending in this sector is discretionary.

Facebook Gets Nosier Than EverMay 20, 2014
Facebook recently made it easier to pry into your friends' private affairs on the social network. Specifically, the Ask button -- which already has been available to those seeking more information about many other aspects of a given user's life -- now is an option when it comes to a user's relationship status as well. If users choose to answer, the information then is added to their profile.

Amazon Rolls Its Shopping Carts Onto Twitter's TurfMay 05, 2014
Amazon is now allowing consumers to add items to their shopping cart simply by sending a reply on Twitter. Users who connect their accounts on the two services can add a product they see in a Twitter link to their Amazon shopping cart simply by replying to the tweet with the hashtag #AmazonCart -- or #AmazonBasket in the UK. The feature is available only in the U.S. and the UK at present.

Investors See Gold Mine in QuoraApril 10, 2014
Why is question-and-answer website Quora so popular with investors? "Because of the high quality of the discussions on the site," answered Paul Levinson, professor of communications and media studies at Fordham. To get a true expert take on the matter one would have to consult Tiger Global Management, which led the Series C venture capital round that brought in $80 million.

Samsung Phone Captures Golden Moment at the OscarsMarch 03, 2014
Several members of Hollywood's elite walked out of LA's Dolby Theatre clutching golden statues on Sunday, but it might have been Samsung that landed the largest victory at the event. Early in the show, host Ellen DeGeneres stopped to capture the moment by using a Samsung phone to take a selfie while on stage. She later repeated the gimmick from the audience -- surrounded by a bunch of stars.